The South Bougainville or East Bougainville languages are a small language family spoken on the island of Bougainville in Papua New Guinea. They were classified as East Papuan languages by

Stephen Wurm Stephen Adolphe Wurm ( hu, Wurm István Adolf, ; 19 August 1922 – 24 October 2001) was a Hungarian-born Australian linguist. Early life Wurm was born in Budapest, the second child to the German-speaking Adolphe Wurm and the Hungarian-sp ...

, but this does not now seem tenable, and was abandoned in ''

Ethnologue ''Ethnologue: Languages of the World'' (stylized as ''Ethnoloɠue'') is an annual reference publication in print and online that provides statistics and other information on the living languages of the world. It is the world's most comprehensiv ...

'' (2009).

Languages

The languages include a closely related group called ''Nasioi'' and three more divergent languages tentatively classified together under the name ''Buin:'' *Buin branch ? ** Buin ** Motuna ** Uisai *Nasioi branch ** Koromira ** Lantanai ** Naasioi ** Nagovisi ** Oune ** Simeku

Proto-South Bougainville

Pronouns

Ross reconstructed three pronoun paradigms for proto-South Bougainville, free forms plus agentive and patientive (see morphosyntactic alignment) affixes: : :''SG: singular; DL: dual; PL: plural''

Lexicon

A detailed historical-comparative study of South Bougainville has been carried out by Evans (2009).Evans, Bethwyn. 2009. Beyond pronouns: further evidence for South Bougainville. In Bethwyn Evans (ed.), ''Discovering history through language: Papers in honour of Malcolm Ross'', 73-101. Canberra: Research School of Pacific and Asian Studies, Australian National University. Reconstructed Proto-South Bougainville lexicon from Evans (2009): ;Proto-South Bougainville reconstructed lexicon :

Austronesian influence

South Bougainville words of likely

Proto-Oceanic Proto-Oceanic (abbr. ''POc'') is a proto-language that historical linguists since Otto Dempwolff have reconstructed as the hypothetical common ancestor of the Oceanic subgroup of the Austronesian language family. Proto-Oceanic is a descendant ...

origin: :

Typology

South Bougainville languages have SOV word order, unlike the SVO Oceanic languages.

References

*''Structural Phylogenetics and the Reconstruction of Ancient Language History''. Michael Dunn, Angela Terrill, Ger Reesink, Robert A. Foley, Stephen C. Levinson. ''Science'' magazine, 23 Sept. 2005, vol. 309, p 2072. * Malcolm Ross (2005). "Pronouns as a preliminary diagnostic for grouping Papuan languages." In: Andrew Pawley, Robert Attenborough, Robin Hide and Jack Golson, eds, ''Papuan pasts: cultural, linguistic and biological histories of Papuan-speaking peoples,'' 15-66. Canberra: Pacific Linguistics. {{language families East Papuan languages Language families Languages of the Autonomous Region of Bougainville